Todd Greenberg's India Pitch Shows Test Cricket Is Chasing Eyeballs, Not Just Anniversaries

Cricket Australia's chief executive has floated the idea of England and Australia playing a Test match in India, and the interesting part isn't the destination - it's the reasoning behind it. Todd Greenberg told BBC Sport that both boards should keep an open mind about staging a match in the one country where cricket's money and attention both live, framing it as a way to help a struggling format find an audience. The Ashes, described by Greenberg as international cricket's most storied and marketable Test rivalry, is being eyed as a way to reach a market that has been drifting away from the format even as it stays central to the sport's finances.

A rivalry with somewhere new to go

England and Australia have traditionally only met in Test cricket through the Ashes itself, a home-and-away arrangement that rotates roughly every four years. Any fixture in India would sit outside that structure entirely and would need sign-off from both the England and Wales Cricket Board and the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Nothing is currently planned, Greenberg said, but he was clear the door isn't closed: "It's not something that we are planning, but it's open for consideration." He described Cricket Australia's relationship with the ECB and BCCI as strong, and said the Indian market still offers scope for more cricket content to be staged there.

Put plainly, that means Cricket Australia is already testing whether its own domestic product travels: the Big Bash League heads overseas for the first time this December, with Melbourne Renegades facing Perth Scorchers in Chennai. The governing body says the move is designed to grow the competition's global appeal by tapping into cricket's biggest market. A Test in India would be a far bigger swing at the same target.

Why India, specifically

The case Greenberg is making rests on a genuine problem. Test cricket's popularity in India has fallen in the modern era, squeezed out by a diet of T20 and the dominance of the Indian Premier League. Against that backdrop, he argued that the longer format still performs relatively well when it involves the three heavyweight nations - Australia, India and England - and that it is bucking the decline seen in some other parts of the world. Growing and strengthening that pocket of interest, he suggested, is now a priority. He went further still, saying he had no doubt a one-off England-Australia Test staged on Indian soil would capture the public imagination.

That's the pitch: put the Ashes brand - box office wherever it lands - directly in front of the audience Test cricket is losing, rather than hoping that audience finds its way back on its own. Whether the ECB or BCCI share the same appetite for reworking a long-standing fixture pattern is untested; Greenberg's comments describe openness to the idea, not an agreement.

The pink ball is already the test case

Before any of that, England and Australia are scheduled to play a one-off Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 2027, marking the 150th anniversary of the first meeting between the two sides. Greenberg confirmed it will be played under lights with a pink ball - the first men's Test to do so at the MCG, following the venue's 1977 centenary Test, which was played in the traditional daytime format. Some high-profile former Australia players are understood to have voiced disapproval to Cricket Australia over the switch, but Greenberg was unapologetic about the reasoning: staging the match in the evening was about maximising attendance, since a daytime fixture would clash with work and school hours, and pink-ball Tests already draw strong crowds in Australia. He also pointed to the commercial reality of broadcasting into the UK time zone. Summing up the trade-off, he said: "It will anger some of the traditionalists but we're in the business of getting more eyeballs on our game."

It's the same commercial logic underpinning the India talk, applied a step earlier: format decisions here are being made for the audience the sport wants, not the one it already has.

Learning from last year's pitch

Greenberg also addressed the playing surface itself, after last year's Ashes Test at the MCG finished inside two days when England won. He said preparations for the anniversary match are aimed at producing a better contest, balancing the celebration of 150 years of history with an eye on how the sport needs to evolve. His stated intention is a flatter pitch with less grass than last time, even while pointing to Cricket Australia's broader record of success in pink-ball Tests.

That's a striking admission in its own right - a chief executive publicly stating an intention to prepare a different kind of surface for a specific occasion. It reinforces the same underlying theme as the India proposal: Cricket Australia is treating the calendar, the format and now the pitch itself as levers to be adjusted for audience rather than fixed traditions to be preserved unchanged.

What it would actually take

None of this moves forward without the ECB and the BCCI agreeing to reshape a fixture pattern that has bound the two countries together in Test cricket for generations. Greenberg's comments describe an opening position rather than a plan, and he was careful to frame the India idea as something to be considered rather than something already in motion. The more concrete step is the anniversary Test itself: already scheduled, already reworked for lights and a pink ball, and already drawing pushback from some who played the rivalry the old way. If that experiment delivers the audience Cricket Australia wants, the India conversation stops being hypothetical.

Research: Our wider editorial research consults online reporting from BBC Sport, Sky Sports, The Guardian and other reputable sources. Story inspiration: BBC Sport's original report.